‘Leaking’ Female Doctorates in the U.S. Stem Academy: A Review and Thematic Synthesis

Abstract

Women comprise less than a quarter of full professors in STEM departments in United States universities, yet women outnumber men at the assistant professor level, underscoring the imbalanced representation of women in the academic career pipeline. In this paper, we present the results of a systematic review which explores the reasons why women are underrepresented (compared to their male counterparts) in STEM academic jobs. We conducted a thematic synthesis of key findings from the included records to identify common explanations for women’s leaks out of the STEM academic pipeline. Our systematic review yielded 98 papers in our final sample, and we derived 16 unique themes from the abstracted findings. We found: 1) there is limited research regarding individual choice and preference to work in STEM academic positions; and 2) there is limited research regarding demand-side factors (e.g., compensation and job availability). We discuss the consequences of the imbalanced literature and why it is important to remedy the paucity of research on these specific elements.

Keywords: STEM, gender, academic employment, academic workforce, leaky pipeline

JEL Classification: J16, A2, I23